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Thread: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

  1. #1
    Elephant CRSP's avatar
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    Default What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    Realistically, if NATO and the Eastern Bloc would have started fighting in the early 80's (for instance), and the war went nuclear, what would the effects on the planet have been? Are we talking about an end to all life apart from bacteria and cockroaches, or local devastation with some countries carrying on as before? Is the nuclear winter a myth, or not?
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    Stegodon
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    In short, FIRES, lots and lots of fires, with far less ability to put them out.
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    aka ivan the not-quite-as-terrible ivan astikov's avatar
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    I've always thought, bearing in mind our size and population density, that the UK is one of the most vulnerable places to this kind of attack.
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    Oliphaunt
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    I always figured it had more to do with an On the Beach type scenario with clouds of radioactive material eventually contaminating every corner of the earth's surface, in addition to the massive devastation to the areas that were themselves direct targets of the nuclear bombs.

    There is a short Cecil Adams article that deals with this:

    http://www.straightdope.com/columns/rea ... uclear-war

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    my god, he's full of stars... OneCentStamp's avatar
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    Dogs and cats...living together...MASS HYSTERIA!!
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    Maximum Proconsul silenus's avatar
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    Definite extreme die-off, but I think an On The Beach scenario rather far-fetched. Nuclear winter for a few seasons, sure. Massive weather disruptions globally, you betcha. All higher life-forms destroyed, no way. Especially since hind-sight shows us that the USSR would have been lucky to get half their nukes out of their silos. In short, very bad but not end-times. If you lived in Africa, you probably wouldn't even notice, except for the weather.
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    my god, he's full of stars... OneCentStamp's avatar
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    Quote Originally posted by silenus
    Massive weather disruptions globally, you betcha.
    Is the "you betcha" here intended to symbolize that even though you live in SoCal, the climate would become like Minnesota?
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    Maximum Proconsul silenus's avatar
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    Or Calgary, Winnepeg, Grand Rapids, or any other arctic hellhole.

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    Stegodon
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    Just as an aside, it is a myth that cockroaches are particularly resistant to radiation.

    http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/ ... 567313.htm

    They're better at it than us, granted.
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  10. #10
    Oliphaunt featherlou's avatar
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    They tested that one on Mythbusters too, I recall - I can't remember which bugs were the hardiest, but it wasn't the cockroaches. Ah, here it is - the flour beetles were the big winners.

    I think we'd get a lot of long-lasting damage from the nuclear fallout - it carries, and it lingers in soil and plants. If you can't grow healthy food, you get sick people. If you get sick and dying people, you get diseases.

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    Stegodon
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    I think Alas, Babylon is a pretty good attempt at a 50's era nuclear war aftermath for people not living near any of the primary targets. They get lucky with the weather, and back then there wasn't nearly as much in Florida as there is now (not to mention that people of the time probably were a lot better prepared to go it on their own) but life does seem possible. They're horrified at the paleolithic necessity that women will have to breastfeed, as I remember.
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    Stegodon
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    I am not certain to what extent this is apropos to the OP's question, however, it may be helpful to consult Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War. Although Kahn's analysis dates from the late fifties to early sixties, that is, prior to the acceleration of arms production in the sixties, the conclusion of that analysis states a nuclear war is not merely necessarily survivable, but possibly rational, depending on the strategy. The analysis is largely quantitative, with particular emphasis on the recovery of population and GDP, and may be prone to being obsolete (especially with the realization of the nuclear winter scenario).

    (Herman Kahn was one of the models used in the conception of Dr. Strangelove. If I remember correctly, Kahn originated the term "megadeath.")

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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    From a little bit of research, I came to the conclusion that the situation would be similar to the following:

    1. Most major metropolitan areas would be pretty well demolished, if only because legitimate warfighting targets (i.e. factories, marshalling yards, highway interchanges, ports, chemical plants, etc...) are pretty tightly integrated into said metropolitan areas.

    For example, if you wanted to hit the purely military/warfighting value targets in the Houston area, you'd end up nuking both sides of the ship channel pretty heavily, you'd end up nuking near downtown for the highway infrastructure, you'd be hitting south of downtown where the railyards are, you'd be hitting down at Texas City for the refineries and port, Galveston for the port, all 3 airports (IAH, Hobby and Ellington), and probably Cameron Iron works/Wyman Gordon on 290 north in Cy-Fair (they make bomb casings), and all sorts of other military-related production facilities (Ellwood Texas Forge, for example, used to make 155mm howitzer breech blocks).

    2. Most non-major metropolitan areas wouldn't suffer nearly so badly from the immediate effects of the strikes. If they were relatively near to one of the metropolitan areas, then short-term fallout could be a big deal, depending on which way the wind was blowing. Everyone would suffer from long-term fallout, but its effects wouldn't be immediately lethal. What it would cause would be more cancers and more birth defects in people and animals, and a higher mutation rate in plants.

    3. Outside of the casualties caused by the initial strikes, the biggest problems would likely be caused by the destruction of distribution and production infrastructure. How many small towns have enough food on hand to last until the harvest? Or medical supplies? Eventually they'd get to be much more sufficient, like 1850s era towns, but until then, people would probably die of starvation and disease.

    4. I'm not sure about the effects of any kind of nuclear winter or autumn, but at the least, they'd play havoc with growing seasons and planting for farmers, and would likely lead to a great deal of disease.

    5. I'm not convinced that any Mad-Max or Jericho type anarchy situations would develop- I suspect that rural America would still respect law and order, and would likely have county militias and the like to keep order and repel any bandits. I think any lawlessness that would happen would happen when food supplies ran out across an area, and civil order breaks down as a result.

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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    Quote Originally posted by The Logos
    I am not certain to what extent this is apropos to the OP's question, however, it may be helpful to consult Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War. Although Kahn's analysis dates from the late fifties to early sixties, that is, prior to the acceleration of arms production in the sixties, the conclusion of that analysis states a nuclear war is not merely necessarily survivable, but possibly rational, depending on the strategy. The analysis is largely quantitative, with particular emphasis on the recovery of population and GDP, and may be prone to being obsolete (especially with the realization of the nuclear winter scenario).
    Permit me to thank you for bringing an authoritative (if somewhat contentious) cite into the discussion. To extend on that, Kahn's Thinking About The Unthinkable In The 1980's updates Kahn's speculations to the late Cold War level of destructiveness. Kahn's thinking remains essentially the same; that war would be destructive to industry and infrastructure, but the long-term effects would be endurable and to some extent mitigable, and that the United States would return to a comparable economic level in a relatively short period. I tend to agree with the former, but take issue with the latter, at least insofar as the opportunity for other nations to compete on a level field would likely result in a more global distribution of industry and particularly the high tech industries (semi-conductor manufacture, pharmaceutical, aerospace, et cetera) that have been traditionally dominated by the United States, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim. I suspect that the US would lose dominance in these fields and its status as an economic superpower would be accordingly reduced.

    In terms of the physical effects of nuclear war, two datum against popular thought and the the public consciousness of the dramatic and apocalyptic are in order. One is that extensive above-ground and atmospheric testing occurred in the 'Fourties through the 'Sixties (ending, at least for the United States and Soviet Union with the Partial Test Band Treaty in 1963), and this did not result in horrific short term climatic effects (though the long term effects of increasing the absorption of radioisotopes and ionizing radiation on the population are still not fully understood but believed to be significant). The other is that the TTAPS Report, which was the first extensive effort to characterize the climate effects of nuclear winter, used assumptions and methods that tend to dramatically overstate the effects, has been further cited out of context to emphasize the extrema, and in general served as the genesis for the hypredramatic and polemical arguments about a nuclear winter holocaust. In fact, the same methodology applied (if superficially) to the oil fires left by Iraqi forces upon their withdrawal from Kuwait vastly overstated climate effects, and more extensive and higher fidelity modeling of nuclear war or meteorite impact events has indicated less severe effects and over a shorter duration than the TTAPS study.

    Which is not to say that nuclear war wouldn't be horrific; first hand accounts of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put the nightmares of Dante to shame. The human cost would be compounded by a level of economic damage which is probably not as nearly reversible (in the case of all-out "total war") as Kahn optimistically (in my opinion) claims. Certainly the competitors would be vastly reduced as players on the world stage. But the ecological effects, while significant, would not be extinction level events as portrayed in On The Beach or The Last Ship.

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  15. #15
    Stegodon
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab15.asp

    In 1962, 117 nuclear weapons were exploded in atmospheric tests, 39 of them by the USA. In 1958 there were 101, with 62 being exploded by the USA. In total, the USA has tested 215 nukes in the atmosphere and 815 underground, with at least 10 underground tests a year from 1961 to 1989. Over 2000 nukes have been exploded in the world, total. There's no evidence that this has effected the climate at all. There probably would be some short term climate changes if several hundred were detonated in one year in cities, but I don't think we'd see a long-term "nuclear winter".

  16. #16
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    Default Re: What would the real effects of a nuclear war be?

    I think we have models that indicate that a "smaller scale" nuclear exhange of about 100 Nuclear weapons would lead to much as five million metric tons of "soot" particles.
    NB these are reputable scientists presenting thier analysis at an academic conference but not publishing it in a peer reviewed journal.

    CITE:
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 090729.htm


    "A cooling of several degrees would occur over large areas of North America and Eurasia, including most of the grain-growing regions," Robock said. "As in the case with earlier nuclear winter calculations, large climatic effects would occur in regions far removed from the target areas or the countries involved in the conflict."

    When Robock and his team applied their climate model to calibrate the recorded response to the 1912 eruptions of Katmai volcano in Alaska, they found that observed temperature anomalies were accurately reproduced. On a grander scale, the 1815 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia -- the largest in the last 500 years -- was followed by killing frosts throughout New England in 1816, during what has become known as "the year without a summer." The weather in Europe was reported to be so cold and wet that the harvest failed and people starved. This historical event, according to Robock, perhaps foreshadows the kind of climate disruptions that would follow a regional nuclear conflict.

    But the climatic disruption resulting from Tambora lasted for only about one year, the authors note. In their most recent computer simulation, in which carbon particles remain in the stratosphere for up to 10 years, the climatic effects are greater and last longer than those associated with the Tambora eruption.

    "With the exchange of 100 15-kiloton weapons as posed in this scenario, the estimated quantities of smoke generated could lead to global climate anomalies exceeding any changes experienced in recorded history," Robock said. "And that's just 0.03 percent of the total explosive power of the current world nuclear arsenal."


    I think we would all be very sorry that this happened.
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